Do I Need To Choose Between My Friends And My Love?

So many people make the common mistake of abandoning their friends to focus on their boyfriend or girlfriend instead. It’s great to be excited about your relationship, but we all need friends as well while we’re dating, for so many reasons.

Here are just a few:

• If you alienate yourself from all of your friends, then you and your boyfriend or girlfriend break up, you will suddenly feel very alone. You may have a sympathetic parent or sibling who can condole you, but it’s not the same as having a close friend, who has shared your trials and joys, who can drop everything to give you love and support when you most need it.
• Maintaining strong friendships will also allow you to keep participating in things that you love. After all, do you and your boyfriend or girlfriend have everything in common? If you play tennis with a friend on Saturday mornings, don’t give it up just because ‘you have a girlfriend now’. If you and the girls have coffee after work every Wednesday, then don’t ditch them because your new boyfriend keeps you too busy. Keep doing the things that you love to do with your friends – this will allow your boyfriend or girlfriend some time to hang out with their friends as well.
• Friends are also great for providing wake-up calls that we might otherwise ignore. Here’s a true story: a young man was deeply in love with a young woman, so much so that he was blind to a serious problem in her life. It wasn’t until a friend mentioned that he was concerned by how thin the girlfriend looked, did the young man ‘click’ that there were some aspects of her behaviour that seemed to indicate she had an eating disorder. He considered how much she ate without ever putting on weight. He recalled how she always spent a long time in the toilet after eating a meal. He realised how often she compared her figure to that of other women and asked if he thought if she was fat. He lovingly confronted his girlfriend who eventually admitted that she had been struggling with bulimia for a few months. She agreed to get some professional help and is currently having treatment. If his friend had never brought up his concerns, then the young man might not have become aware of his girlfriend’s eating disorder until it had caused a lot more mental and physical damage.
• Having friends around can also help to keep you both accountable and it will decrease the desire and opportunity for sexual temptation.

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